Spinning my life yarn

It is my story, and I am sticking to it

The sea water tickles my toes as it oscillates between the the sand and the waves. The beaming sun brushes against my skin, on my face, and below my rolled-up pants. The sound of the ocean is similar to the singing of the young men of my mother`s village- she is holding my left hand at this moment.

I feel her grip slipping, and I crash with my backside on the wet sand. My pants get wet, and some water splashes on to my shirt. I cry, blaming my mother for this ordeal. I did not want to get in the water or any other interaction with this water behemoth. She had persuaded me, and I had fallen for it. Then I literally fell into it. This is my earliest memory of the ocean, my experiences of the ocean have done a 360 degree turn, and I now love the ocean like I love storytelling some thirty odd years later.

At this time I was living in my mother`s village, on a valley between maXesibeni and kwaBhaca on the wild coast of Azania (also known as South Africa). There was a tradition here- we never went a day without a story (fairy-tale or myth) being told, around the fire at night. It was mostly the grand old ladies who were the custodians of this tradition; but like the masters that they were in the transfer of skills they made us young ones retell some of the stories that they had told us. These stories were in the mould of magic-realism, and at that tender age I believed them to be true in our realm.

I was yanked out of that blissful life by the obligation of having to go to school and get a different sort of education. I despised it until my last few years of schooling. For someone who up to that point had been treading the open veld, running after edible insects, and hunting for birds` nests school was a culture shock. For one I had to sit down for the whole day- what five year old wants to do that- and listen to an adult tell me what I should be doing. If I did it wrong I got a beating- what? We were writing on a slate and had to erase what we had written to write the next thing- and that form of education required memorization, and I find that it defeated all logic. I grit my teeth and continued with the mental torture as I felt I had no choice.

Needless to say the only liberating moments were outside of school times. One of those moments was the music and the dancing of the village folks. The graceful movement accompanying the angelic voices was a thing to behold. At some point in the 1980`s my father bought a car. It was a shiny thing of wonder, the latest model of that make. There was a song he played almost ad-nauseum, but I still love it to this day. The song was entitled Burn out, by Sipho Mabuse, and I still bob to it to this day. Yes, despite the teething problems, the aesthetics of the wild coast were hypnotic.

I was shunted off to a Catholic boarding school also on the Wild Coast, in Cwele. The the view of the ocean and the sea breeze soothed the mental agony I was writhing from it was still a tormenting experience most of the time. Something profound happened here though. I have since discovered that Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist termed it synchronicity. We had just had supper and were now sitting in front of the dining hall shooting the breeze. Someone must have been overshooting because I felt this gnawing urge to leave the group. I did. As I turned the corner it seemed like I was entering the metaverse- long before Zuckerburg brought it to collective consciousness. The earth seemed to tremble. The signal of my optical prism got scrambled. I am quite sure I had stepped into another realm. Firstly I had never seen dogs at that school. The place was quite isolated. The more mysterious thing is that they were feeding on the carcass of a cat. As a rural boy I had seen dogs chase cats on a daily basis, never had I seen them catch a single cat- not that I would want to see that. But on that occasion I was seeing it in high definition. The dogs were still smelling of their mother`s milk (figuratively) yet they snarled and growled at me. I ran. When I got back to my pals I did not say a word about what I had just seen. They were going to think I belong in a mental asylum. In fact I did not share that episode with anybody for ten years, and the young fellow I shared it with tragically died young- could it be that the magic realism I was raised on hatched superstitions in me! The scene was to synchronise with another I witnessed after I was walking to my parents house in the city of Mthatha after I had completed college. The dogs looked the same except that they had grown bigger in this instance, and they were not aggressive, and they were just rummaging tamely through a rubbish. They looked at me and went on with their business.

Did I mention that I went to college? I did. I studied journalism . What else? They did not offer storytelling- the spell of that magic realism. It was the closest I could get to storytelling. I may be putting the horse before the cart here. My relationship with school had warmed up tremendously- and in high school I was actually looking forward to going to school in the mornings. I do not know if the location of my parents house, about a hundred meters from the banks of the Mthatha River, had anything to do with the euphoric twist in my relationship with schooling. On most mornings I would wake up to witness a layer of mist snuggly undulating in the direction of the river water. That magic realism did not just live in fairy-tales after all. And at high school- Zingisa Comprehensive High School- they fanned my creative fire. I had these teachers who believed in my potential so much that they the English teacher forced me to join her drama team. I took to it with gusto, and I have never looked back. When I was twenty six years old I won a writing award from the parent company of the Sunday Times, one of the most prestigious media companies in South Africa. So surreal. It fuelled my writing zest.

I continued getting these serendipitous moments, which Carl Jung called synchronicity. One of the most defining ones was when I was walking on that fabled street towards my parents house, near the Mthatha River. The road on that part of the street was rather well paved. But on this day I was unintentionally ignoring the furious tweeting of birds on the electricity poles when I tripped on heap of bitumen on the road. I knew there was something more to it than just me tripping on a well paved road- that magic realism. I glanced in the direction of the birds. Below them was a video tape. VHS had long gone out of vogue by then. What was this dramatic episode telling me. I made up my mind that it meant that I must make films.

Later on I packed up my bags and headed to Johannesburg. After numerous bumps and bruises I found myself working at a film school called Eagles Academy. Here they got me a top television writer to train me. I left that school at the beginning of the year 2023. Recently I was thinking of the best years of my life thus far, and I discovered that it was the years I invested at that school.

By the way that television writer told me that I am the kind of writer that can hear the music of the story I am writing. I trust that you will also hear the music of this story ad-nauseum.